Quote:Original post by Programmer16
My main piece of advice: if you use it, make it skippable.
After giving it some thought I think this is the best way to go. Since I'm working on a Metroidvania style game, most of the elements of the gameplay should be familiar to a good number of gamers, so having the tutorial in non-linear optional stages is what I'm going to do.
Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
I find that a good tutorial is often the most fun part of a game, because you are experimenting with a new gameplay element, not just doing the same old thing
I like your analogy to Zelda. Once I'm done fleshing out all the power ups and abilities for my game, I'll definitely be thinking about how to implement this. I think Portal did an excellent job of a tutorial stage because the first half of the game was tutorial stages, though very subtly masked. The Valve commentary for Portal was pretty interesting from a design perspective, they talk about design challenges like helping the player understand how portals worked, and how to get them accustomed to new gameplay mechanics as they were introduced.
MarkM: I'm not working on an RTS, and I'm not familiar with Battle for Wesnoth, but I'll check it out over the weekend. I can see, though, how making a player do the tutorial for an RTS would be valuable (I play the tutorial stages every time I start an RTS, but then again I'm really bad at that genre,) and I agree with you that having a tutorial be a valuable scenario to play through can be interesting - though sometimes they introduce so much story in the tutorial stage that it gets back to what what Khaiy was saying about cut scenes and forcing the story into the early stages of the game. It's just not a very good way to draw people in on a more linear, story-based game type.
